Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.

It affects everybody.

We will be building architectural blueprints for software "buildings" same as Civic Engineers and Architects do for bridges and towers.

I don't want to think of what the digital equivalent of the Hyatt Regency collapse would be, considering that the software could be deployed all around the globe rather than in one place in one building.

If only we knew how. All we seem to know formally given popular discourse is languages, frameworks, tools, protocols and algorithms.

Thinking about how to move beyond functional decomposition and structured design to enable those “blueprints” isn’t even on the agenda?

This stuff has empowered me to finish the BS I don’t want to do rapidly then do other cool stuff I want to do.

Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.

Anyway I have one blog post about it. I'm working on the implementation now, just takes a while. I'm close to having a parser (not semantic analysis) and I'll probably do a dev log.

*semi-perfect

This is important topic to a huge portion of HN readers and to see how were feeling / thinking during these times of uncertainity.

Your/our place(s) in society have been shaken up like dice in a cup...and someone may not even care to pour them out and see what numbers come out.

What are you like when no one is watching?

Like any death, it will re-arrange your values.

Fortunately existentialist philosophers have been grasping with this for some time.

The secret is you have to make your own meaning. It can be scary. Don't freak out. You've essentially been forced to become a radical non-conformist.

Also: the ego usually reassembles itself like the robot in Saturn 3. It just comes back a little different, a little more mature. And often it's grateful for every good thing you've ever done for yourself and others.

Existentialism is one approach, or you can turn towards Camus and accept life has no ultimate meaning, and live intensely despite that knowledge.

I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist, and I enjoy exploring the problem space and working my way to a good solution. AI is great because it accelerates my abilities in this regard.

If I'd had only extrinsic motivations of credit and money, I can see that AI would affect them negatively. But I'd also have to believe that anyone else could AI-shortcut their way to whatever I make. I don't really believe that TBH. A real solution is extremely nuanced: it addresses many, many edge cases; it is performant in CPU and memory use; its UX steers the user away from incidental complications straight to the solution they're seeking. Being able to attend to all that doesn't seem everyone's cup of tea.

Finally, even if someone just copied whatever I had made, I would still have the satisfaction of knowing I was the original and they the copycat. That's good enough for me.

>Is it that I want to have done it? Would I be happy if someone else did it? (credit)

>Is it that I want to be doing it? (achievement/process)

>I want to have a mix. I want to do some things for the experience and some things for the accomplishment. I want to do some easy things and some hard things. Some fun things and some unfun things. Some things just for me and some things for others.

Amit Patel, via https://digitalseams.com/blog/amit-patel-on-making-things

I am also extrinsically motivated, as everybody is. The "if you don't like AI, then you only cared about the money" implication is nonsensical. I'm not going to starve or become homeless, but I absolutely could lose my current home. That would drive me to depression. I also don't want to have a job I don't enjoy at all. That would turn me into a different person. A miserable person. Switching to something I can learn to do within a short enough time frame that I'm not being financially irresponsible, that I enjoy at least a little, and that ultimately ends up paying at least 75% of what my previous job pays, is essentially not realistic.

I'm trying to say if you don't want to do the work because you think anyone at all can do the same job with AI, then 1) you're probably underestimating yourself, and 2) maybe you care less about the work than about being on the other side of a moat of knowledge and experience. That moat is still there, and a large part of it is caring about the work.

(Also I agree that AI changes the end product if one doesn't read the code, but I don't agree that we are all necessarily forced by the economics to operate it that way. I still plan how to implement features myself first, without AI; I still read every line of code; and I still sometimes step in and rewrite the AI patch myself. I'm lucky not to have a boss breathing down my neck, I realise; at least that's true for the moment while my savings haven't run out.)

Isn't that extrinsic motivation? You're motivated by the desire to bring something outside of yourself into existence. The software project doesn't exist within you.

Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1].

I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it.

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

If it’s only me, I can say it’s burnout and depression, if it’s an entire class of people, then the world is sick.

As for AI, I have mellowed in my extreme doomer position, though I still believe people have unrealistically high expectations and the reality of it is gonna hit tech very hard in the face soon.

Perhaps AI has instilled into me an appreciation for the human creativity, and humanity as a whole, and there’s not much of it to be found online. The Internet was an exciting place where we came to develop our nerdy selves, and today we find having to accept it has become a smelly, dirty shanty town with open air sewer, everybody hustling for a coin. It’s time to unplug.

But in my time off, I've done my own coding projects and I've rediscovered my love for code. I realized it never left, what I grew to dislike is coding in a corporate environment. But coding for myself is different, I do it for my own rewards and satisfaction. And nothing beats coding for that, really. You get to make things and take pride.

I have tried the solo entrepreneur route once, it didn't go very well but these days I figure it's hard to carve a niche selling software to people. I feel I'd have better chances in creative arts (game dev) than selling any other piece of software on my own; it's quite a frightening (and exciting) commitment to go down that path.

I have spent the last 3 months dilly dallying around this conundrum, and haven't made much progress. It's scary having to reinvent your career in your 40s.

Since we are talking about AI, I'll bring up one thing that hasn't changed, or hasn't been solved at least by AI. Understanding. We are producing so much more than ever, yet we are not understanding the world better.

You can experiment it yourself, just because you have the world's knowledge at your fingertips doesn't make you an expert in every field. I asked an LLM to teach me everything I need to know about batteries so I can get into the business. All the information is there, a well crafted curriculum. The amount I didn't know that I didn't know before starting is depressing.

Extend this to the idea that now everyone knows everything about everything and you'll quickly realize that we still don't understand much about anything despite this powerful tool on our hand.

Understanding things still matters.

LLMs completely kill this gatekeeping, for good or bad. And we're seeing the after effects. I don't know how to feel about this.

> I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you.

The machine understanding things doesn't make us understand things. Especially when The Machine Stops™

2. why haven't we developed organs in the lab yet?

3. why haven't we invented space travel yet?

4. why haven't we solved food, shelter, cover for all human beings on planet earth yet?

5. why don't we have absolute democracy and have hold politicians accountable for their inaction, exploit and abuse? (specifically using Software and AI). Where are the dashboards of all public info of each politicians with organization chart of each country representing top leader with nodes of people working under him/her and further down.

In fact, I would go so far as to say countries have no business being that large. That's the root of all our problems. Bring back city states.

I'd be happy with a sane system of taxation supporting a coherent budget.

They're on the front page news. And no one (with the power to do anything) cares.

Besides, as soon as you introduce this kind of checking, you'll just cement the oligarchy. The winning strategy would be for a billionaire not officially in government to work their magic through a puppet with a clean tax report.

It is that we are governed by those chosen by us to represent us. In a perfect democracy the government is (the majority of) us. Hence the saying … “in a democracy the people get the government they deserve”.

When I think back to the 90s when the internet became popular, to me, living in the middle of nowhere, being able to interact with others through a computer, it was such an exciting time and it is what got me into programming. I believe right now today, there will be young people who may, just like me, be super excited about this AI thing, want to learn more about it, become a wielder of it, with all the energy and hope that comes with youth, just like when I discovered the internet. To them AI is not a "learn this new thing or you are going to be left behind", but it is probably something that gives them hope.

Even older people can do this. I remember when I was 16 a taxi driver, probably in his 50s asking me to tell him about this internet thing: "what should I do to learn the internet?". I fondly remember this driver since he seemed to have such an innoncent interest and willingness to learn from this 16 year old who didn't know anything himself.

Even with AI, as good as it is now, as well as with it becoming better, people will be part of the process. Although I'm nostalgic about how software used to be created, I'm trying to embrace the new way of doing things and look for new opportunities and a way how I can make a difference, with a positive outlook - this has never failed for me in the past.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323932

Unfortunately, I'm not so optimistic. If the rapid change in AI advancement continues at this rate, bar some world wars or an economic collapse, we will face an existensial crisis as humans. AI for me is not attacking or replacing human jobs, it is coming after the cost of our own intelligence. I fear that the cost of human intelligence will go down with time compared to AI. We will no longer be needed to perform tasks as part of an economic framework (capitalism or other will not matter). Money will not be worth anything and hopefully we get to UBI quickly. I don't believe that my son who is 5 will work till retirement age.

Read Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Everything under the sun is vain, as we will all eventually find out.

Nothing will satisfy us because our emptiness was never meant to be filled with code, knowledge, or whatever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlvOrTq4Bes

We can now build apps with a TAM of 1 or 2 viable at scale - I still have hope there's a lot of good we can do for the world with that new reality. Purpose-built tools for super niche, high-impact problems, where software isn't the end goal, it's just a means to an end.

What do you think? Still meaningless?

- nothing does matter. You will die. We may meet in the Bardo if you are spectacularly unlucky.

- the trick is now being kind and enjoying your time after discovering this.

Before this turns into an endless rant, back to the question: in the age of "100:1 agents to human ratio soon?", we should be even more nicer to each other fellow human beings. That may help us find purpose/motivations again.

Its a false sense of efficacy. Like looking at a dating app and thinking you could date any or all those people: the reality is no you can't and you don't even know it.

So cheer up: life is still hard as f*ck.

I myself have built so much shit lately but it all feels incredibly shallow.

I used to get joy from software, now it feels like fast fashion. Even systems engineering and low level code. Fast fashion. Derivative shit, flung at the void.

I said pretty much exactly the same thing on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334614

> My sense is that AI appeals to the types of people video game cheat codes appeal to. If you feel satisfaction from completing games with unlimited health, then you probably love AI. I'm not that person. I like things I do to be hard with high barriers to entry.

But yes, I feel this acutely and it hurts me terribly.

I've been an AI doomer for like 15 years so the existential risks bother me emotionally less as I've lived for almost half of my life believe AI would ultimately kill me. What I never expected was for it to take so much from me along the way. This meaningless is something I've been adjusting to for the last 1-2 years, and as someone who very self-motivated and is always doing something it's not something I'm used to feeling.

I knew automation was coming though and honestly should have seen this. Even to some extent in SWE I realised that the job was likely going to change a lot from AI after we first saw LLMs be able to generate simple syntax. But I guess I never considered that the writing I did (in AI), and the other creative tech pursuits I did would also be so easily automatable.

AI has robbed me of both things I loved and the many years of my life I invested in those things.

But I don't like to complain about this stuff. I work in AI and think about how to automate people's jobs away for my day job. I can't complain about karma which is due. It hurts, but at least for me, I am grateful for the pain on some level.

This is on things like "we have to migrate how we do TLS termination via coordinated infra changes and DNS changes for a couple thousand customers, many of which are fortune 500 companies". It's maddening. If there's stakes, and it's not a small enough problem that there's not already a StackOverflow post/library for how to do XYZ, then you have to be so vigilant.

Upgrade toward sales and management ?. At least cover our basic daily needs, so we still have freedom to explore different interesting domains.

I feel sorry for brilliant engineers who rely too heavily on their technical skills, because those skills can become almost "irrelevant" in day-to-day work.

Some of them literally refuse to adopt AI in their problem-solving process. They still can't accept that “my hard-earned knowledge from decades of learning can be wiped out in just one day.”

I got over it. But it took time. I reinvented myself - I had always liked writing code. So I pivoted to this and literally went back to grad school to study AI.

I’m watching a lot of people right now flounder like I did in the first year or so after I got sick. They’re grieving. They’ll move beyond it, but it’s immensely painful to them right now.

It’s become much harder to get back into the airline industry now because of the supply-demand situation.

Anyway, my friend now became regular staff at local factory, doing something completely unrelated to aviation and aerospace knowledge. It’s really painful to break out of our “locked-in” comfort zone.

I would go back tomorrow if I could, but I also recognize that chapter of my life is over, over 7000hrs is enough for one life time. But maybe I'll get lucky, and medicine will advance? I'm not holding my breath.

Reguardless, that's what I see, people grieving and being ANGRY because they aren't quite sure what to do with their newfound uselessness. I was that way for a long while. The feeling like you're not a part of it anymore, or that all that work and effort, was for nought.

But if anyone reading this is struggling with these sorts of feelings (like OP), understand that the experiences that brought you here, they are what make you who you are! They're a part of you! But they don't totally make you up. You should use your perspective to see if you can make even more crazy and creative and magnificent things than you ever could before! And most importantly, do it for you.

Society is really going to be totally overturned by this. The responses I see, the attitudes people have, a lot of it is stuff I just lived through a couple years ago. Good luck folks, you should probably go hiking more.

Selfish? Maybe. What I see from a lot of people I talk to about this stuff is anger and frustration. So they lash out at the guy who says, "hey you can be mad, but you're still going to have to figure out your stuff." I can give advice, you're free to take it or not, but this is not a situation where there is a rule book. You're going to have to forge a new path - things are changing, and you will have to adapt or suffer the consequences of not adapting. There is no one person to blame for this problem (except for maybe yourselves if you were too invested in "dev" as an identity), there is no way to un-invent these tools. It's not going away.

"Just handle your situation" is the right answer here. That's what you're going to have to do anyway. When you get done blubbering about what could have been (and believe me, I did quite a bit of blubbering too), you'll eventually need to get up off your ass and do something in this changed world. I know that sucks, and I know it's not what you want to hear. But these are the facts on the ground right now.

I'm sorry this is happening to you guys (and I guess me twice), but I've been here before, I know what it is like. You can take the advice of a guy who's already been hiking a similar mountain for a few years, or you can say, "screw you man!" That's up to you, but I promise you that being angry will not halt AI coding agents or AI progress in general. You're going to have to adapt to the new world, and if you cannot adapt you are going to suffer more. How do I know? Because I fucking lived this already once.

Once you're done grieving, you can start to say, "oh, what are the new found opportunities in this world where I can't do $old_career?" If you need help along the way, I'm here, but you shouldn't expect me to abandon my lived experience with this stuff. It sucks to lose a career, but the faster you can let go of the old identity and forge a better one, the better you'll be for it.

The effects they're talking about are not as shallow as finding employment in doing the same thing they initially expected to do. The reason so many people feel hollow, in addition to the job loss, is that the deployment of AI coincides with the accelerating hollowing-out and financialization of the world, especially the tech world. I don't think nearly as many people who still can be employed in tech would have such a big problem if they still felt like they were paid to solve problems and make things happen, even if indirectly. Instead what everyone is feeling, even many expert AI users, is that now everyone is increasingly working on creating the appearance of value, not actual value. Instead of serving customers, they make numbers look good to shareholders, hype up whatever they want to hear and line the pockets of people whose level of wealth they will never reach. The number of tech sub-fields where this isn't a theme is thinning by the day. So it goes much deeper than "I need to train for another job" - lots of people make that choice every day. By suggesting that these people need to study AI like you, you're telling them they need to accept the corporate system they hate. Become one with the financial interests.

I am your opposite. I started out by being enthusiastic about machine learning, I was fascinated by GPT-2 or image generation demos years before normal people found out about it. I saw the tech field as flawed, but good enough. And after all, back then engineers had a real value and a voice, they could push back and advocate for better technical solution, they still hadn't become the unvalued scavengers of "look what AI made for me" produced by people who have no idea what they're doing. Now that AI has pushed 80% of tech firmly into the "enriching the immensely wealthy and bringing about a dystopian world" paradigm, I'm looking to go back and do something that will actually benefit real people. Not any of the grass-is-greener farming fantasies people post about occasionally - I still like technology, I just want to use it for real, actual work. That's what OP and many others are probably feeling.

You can take my advice, or you can ignore it. Up to you, but what I see, from my limited perspective, is a lot of people grieving not being useful in the same way they used to be. They can adapt, or they can suffer. Not trying to be callous or whatever, but the sooner people stop making their identity about their careers the better.

And let's be real, 99% of code never created any real value in the world anyway. You think that the B2B SaaS dashboard you built for some company called Wankytottle was really valuable in any sense of the word? You don't have to accept "the system," especially now.

I explained why the grief that people feel isn't just tied to employment, but their overall perception of how the world is doing and what it's like to thrive in it. It's especially pertinent because OP isn't pushed out and trying to find something else to do - judging by the post, they're still in the game, still doing all the right AI things. They're just exhausted and questioning the meaning of it all.

I find these emotions to usually be the strongest for people who used to do something they saw as valuable in the past, but don't anymore - or at least people who thought that were satisfied by solving problems even if no one but them would ever appreciate the solution. The B2B SaaS webdevs and similar archetypical solvers of trivial low-value problems are the ones who love AI the most.

Somehow, a lot of people can't understand me. Seems like 90% of programmers hate chess. They only enjoyed winning. Sad thing is, now every "guy bagging groceries" can win, what is exactly your value?

Holy F. elephant in the room !

I am unemployed and surviving since last 4 years and being creative every day. In between I am also doing what I really want to do.

I have raised my bar really high to weed out the shitty employers and companies after 16 years in the industry and focus on what I want to do. I believe the money will just follow. It always has for me.

I am at my happiest when I am out of tokens and working on projects that I care about myself, and am forced to tradcode. I think going forward I will have a few "Tradcode only" projects that personally interest me, to work on when I need a fix-me-up.

Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?

I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.

On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.

If you want to get excited… think about all the things that ever got you excited about the future. Then think about how you basically had to defer the possibility of them happening in your lifetime.

Readjust your timelines! Determine what is the most amazing thing that could happen, that you could contribute to, by orchestrating computation effectively.

I mean we don’t even have a cure for cancer yet!

https://m.fictionpress.com/s/3353977/1/The-End-of-Creative-S...

I think things will turn around by the end of next year, but not before some major reckoning. There is a lot of motivated reasoning going on right now with trillions of dollars at stake where people aren’t being discerning and honest about what AI is actually capable of, and a lot of circular cash flow that’s making it seem more successful than it really is. I think when it really arrives, we’ll see a creative explosion that enriches our lives, where everything isn’t just cheaper to make at 80% of its former quality but actually better quality too. And I believe the solutions for improving quality will surface the things that human beings can uniquely do that AI can’t and give meaning back to our lives, but right now we’re in a shitty in between phase.

The way I see it is that we are in Year 1/2 of the AI era. We can already see the issues too.

* Github can't keep up with the commits

* AI data centers build out being increasingly challenged

* Electricity grids unable to keep up the pace

Now all of this doesn't mean AI is not revolutionary. It absolutely is. It is to say that the pace of change will be slower

Also, I believe learning new CS concepts and side projects are still going to matter. Because as much as today is about anyone can code the long term challenge is going to be running and maintaining it the said code.

Can you imagine a world where AI is the only source of truth? Can you imagine the level of bias and manipulation that beast can have?

Let's keep playing without cheats.

===

"Don't Take the Black Pill - Andrew Kelley | SSW 2026"

Abstract: In our modern world, it's easy to feel like things are careening out of control; that the future is happening to us while we take a back seat... and all we can do is lie down and rot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZwpH5lCD4

A key reason is that so many CS concepts are already well packaged in very nice libraries or frameworks. And unfortunately many people do not have to use very advanced CS concepts. Look at the so-called top 10 algorithms or data structures for <your favorite area>, how many of them are invented recently, and how many of them do not have an amazing library of production quality? Note this does not mean that the CS field is not advancing. It's just that we have yet to find another hyper-growth area that demands novel algorithm, except probably the AI infra - except that only very few people get to work on that area.

Took me a while but turns out the best reason I found to exist was taking cool pictures of bugs. Fuck me are spiders cool. Dragonflies are incredible. Look at that springtail!

Do something ai can't take from you.

I set myself a goal to find all 3 species of a particular spider genus in my state. Got it! Moving on to finding a bolas spider.

idk. There really is a lot to enjoy outside the collapse of the things I used to enjoy and define my existence by.

With AI, everything is one-off code, and removes the impetus to make software as a whole easier for future coding.

This is in an age when improving things should be monumentally easier.

But there's no open source reputation to be obtained now. No monetary gain from consulting on open source projects. No reason to open source closed source code because it might be useful to other programmers.

That means software stops improving

And look around you - so much pain and suffering in the world. Lots and lots of problems to be solved, hopefully helped by all this technology.

Ptolemy I: "I have this 'Royal Road' AI right here."

E: "Can it tell you the precise product of pi*e?"

P: "Piece of cake."

One thing to keep in mind is the world probably felt this way a few times as well. During the Vietnam War and the administration at the time probably made people feel powerless to do anything. 1930s crash. Lots of other examples like this.

AI certainly seems like a unique tipping point that reaches into all aspects of humanity. So, maybe it’s different this time.

The times are a-changing; what's relevant now is figuring out the most efficient uses of AI, and keeping up with how that evolves month to month. Big opportunities there for people who can stay flexible.

This realisation that you have come too, will likely lead to a better place, much like all struggles.

In regards to AI, it feels like I have finally been given the tools. For me, the world now feels so open. I can make websites now, I can do the things I have always wanted to do with computers and code. Your world is finally accessible to me.

In regards to you, I think you should read 'What Color is Your Parachute?' again. Yes, that sounds trite and glib, I am sorry. And yes, it sounds like boomer advice, I know. But the exercises in that book really are great stuff. There is a reason it's one of the best non-fiction sellers for like the last 40 years. And yes, I know, NPC-level advice here

I really hope you find your path again. The world isn't going to turn into paperclip maximizing AI gods (Look, Claude gave me $1000 for free the other week. Aint no one do that if they aren't scared shitless that the music is about to stop). We're going to be fine, so will you. You got this, I believe in you.

Also, the LinkedIn recruiter semi flood of messages offering potential jobs has dried up completely(anyone else experience this too?). Linkedin is now just a sad and depressing place as you read others sharing similar sentiment.

I'm now in medical school pursing mid-level medical type job. This after 17 years of doing UX Research, Web/graphic design and front-end development. 10 of those years I was working in govt indirectly making very good money and little stress. Now my future in the next few months is hospital work with lots of stress and less pay. A bit depressing but i dont dwell on it too much just keep pushing ahead!

Consciously, "Like" job posts. That is, in the feed section of linkedin, "like" any type of jobs that you see others post. Linkedin will show you more job posts in your feed, which others post. You "like" that too. Then it will show more job postings. Keep liking that too from your feed. But don't like or view or read any other posts while you do this. Not even your friends/partner's posts.

Do this at least 3-4 times a day, with 5-10 likes in each batch.

In a week's time, Linkedin will flood your feed with job posts from actual users. Now you become selective and like only design/web developer posts that your skills align with. Then it will bring more of it and you might be able to find something.

There are two things that happens. Recruiters/hiring managers see that you liked their post, so they check your profile. Keep it updated. Your profile visits will also go up. Linkedin sees that your profile is viewed by more recruiters, and your profile will be shown above other profiles when recruiters search using their tool.

I hope you get a job soon, and you can thank me later!

I like being in demand and not have to chase or be in a massive pile of others vying for a job. Hence why i am getting into mid level medical jobs where there is a large shortage of these types of workers. Yet, it's less pay and more stress but stability, I get to help people and with a shortage of workers I should be able to boost my pay as I did in tech.

I currently use AI both for work and for side projects. My usage patterns are different in both cases and make me think about different things.

At work, where I'm working on a large, long-term codebase, we still code review. Knowing concepts about the language and coding style still helps me there, if only to make the code reviews easier and the code more readable and scalable (but also in actually improving the quality and weeding out bugs). I agree that catching up with the latest technologies and patterns became a lower priority, and I miss it being relevant, but honestly I feel like I should get back to it because it still helps.

At personal projects - well, I'm actually finishing stuff! The joy of creation didn't dissapear, it's just different. Here, too, I miss the riddle solving and thought that had to go to coding, but seeing my vision becoming real - and actually getting to a stage where it's useful and polished - is satisfying. As for activating cheat codes - partially true. I feel like without my previous frontend knowledge and UX approach, my projects would have been much more slop-like.

I don't agree with people not caring about new side projects. I'm working on utilities for my tea and cocktail hobbies, and getting very good responses from fellow enthusiasts, and that's also very satisfying.

As for the jobs not being there next year - I'm not sure the trend of "replacing all devs with AI" will continue forever, or that it is continuing in full force now. As far as I know, companies begin to realize that the human developers are not that irreplaceable. And I think that in startups the situation might be a bit different than the large companies we hear about in the news (backed by my last job search last December).

I know the situation can be despairing, and I hope you'll find a silver lining.

Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.

Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.

All of a sudden, your competition is anyone from anywhere in the world. Yes, to really make a million dollars, you need more than making the software. Even if you end up making a million dollars, you have 1000s of copy-cats from all parts of the world stealing your pie in no time. An average Joe will have tough time knowing which one is good and which ones to avoid.

Congratulations: you’re a systems engineer now.

  The coffins stood about waist high and were constructed of what appeared to be white marble, which is almost certainly what it was - something that only appeared to be white marble.

See better.

There is the pesky little matter of jobs and paying rent and capitalism which will cause a lot of turmoil for a very long time, but once we get past that we have our work cut out for us.

"You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

My problem though is that I thought that at this point of life I'd already be married or something, while it looks like no matter how much effort I put into being social, at the end of the day I'm alone. It really sucks because it's not "just hang on a little longer" anymore, it's going into the territory of "you'll spend most of your life alone".

I heavily invested into dream of learning throughout all my life and benefiting from it financially and socially. Now it seems that won't come to be true. I've always been taught since childhood that the important things are those that you can carry in your head, because no one is going to take it away from you. I guess now they are wrong, while it cannot be taken directly it can be heavily debased to the point of pointlessness of having it.

On top of that, the enshittification of everything tech-related, tightening grip on privacy. Quality collapse, not just what I am doesn't have any value, but nothing produced by anyone does. For example, I don't consider reading books that came after ~2024. On top of that, fear of bigger changes and turmoils related to redistribution of wealth (always upwards, of course), dystopic vision of the future. On top of that, war in my country with no end in sight and shifts to authoritarianism.

I'm trying to find a way out of this, and I'm finding interesting observations. For example, one shouldn't overinvest themselves into anything - "never keep all you eggs in the same basket", because nothing is permanent. For me that was the idea of continuous self-improvement that would allow me to keep both a fulfilling job and middle-class lifestyle. It was the most important thing in life, and, of course, when it shattered the pain was substantial. It is possible to find and have other important things in life, some of them could be friends, family, community.

Then, no one is going to take away what you do with your mind, especially in free time. You could give up on everything AI related and just enjoy the things you like. Maybe on the worse side of job market there won't be much apart from mercenaries, drug dealers and prostitutes. But in all better cases there's going to be something to occupy yourself with and live relatively serene life. Janitor, any kind of manual laborer that cannot be automated, small farmer, to name a few that came to mind. In free time (or during work even) you could read/listen to anything you like.

And then, this is just the baseline, things could actually turn out better.

- David Foster Wallace

In Western culture we tend to define ourselves based on our job, aka our economic output. That person is a fireman. That person is a doctor, or programmer, or whatever. As such, we are nowhere near ready for a world in which AI does all the knowledge-based work and leaves humans with nothing but manual labor. You* need to realize that your life never had any more meaning than that of the grocery bagger, or the ditch digger, or the vagrant, or even the criminal.

*the general "you", not you specifically.

Just like with a video game, just because the cheat mode exists, doesn't mean you have to use it. I suggest you do things you enjoy doing, and not worry about what value other people may or may not see in the results. Some people get great satisfaction from creating sand sculptures, while always knowing the work will be destroyed in a matter of days, or even hours. Take pleasure in the act, rather than the result.

On one hand, the possibility to make something genuinely new feels gone. There was always a huge crowd of better developers than myself, but still, they couldn't take all the ideas for themselves. Now they can.

On the other hand, I love the process of programming, and the feeling of accomplishment it brings to me. I don't know if I'm still going to have it at work, and this is genuinely important, but at least nobody is going to take my personal projects from me.

Tonight I was up until 3.30 am, writing a CLI to wrangle a shapefile into a set of vector tiles that would then be rendered into PNGs. Opus could probably have done this in five minutes. I'm writing this (mostly) myself, it's been two evenings of work, and I'm not done. If Opus could know how utterly I don't care about this fact, it would have cried. I'm not gonna stop eating cheese just because a robot can eat it better.

(But I'm not trying to debate you here, you feel what you feel, and if I don't agree then it's none of my business anyway. Hope you find strength!)

Every IC now has an entire army of claude or whatever agents indulging all their bullshit endlessly. I'm seeing it in fortune 200s all over the place at the moment. You have IC after IC just dopamine maxxing solutions left and right that don't play well with other IC solutions. Little fiefdoms exactly like what you would find at management barriers but so much worse somehow because for the majority of it you take one look and realize it's complete slop.

I honestly don't know how all this shit will get cleaned up but it seems like ICs are doing an insane amount of damage all over the place probably because everyone is depressed and demoralized and basically like 'fuck it'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

I’m more or less a practicing Stoic and non-believer. Life never had any meaning, you have to create whichever one you can.

If someone can take away your purpose in life, it was too influenced by external factors. I get it. Someone stole my start-up away from me, you go through a period of anger and despair.

Do some shrooms, if you can and find your set and setting safe enough.

Focus in your hobbies. Have a kid ;)

Good luck stranger. I both agree with you and empathise with the despair. I hope the world rebuilds anew, with less elites, less power, less greed, less attempts and making humans redundant.

On a similar note... the whole idea behind making your own furniture is similar to hand rolling code. You can go ahead and buy a dresser or bed at ikea and call it a day, but the quality is complete shit. Or you could build something that will last a life time and be praised for it's quality.

[1]: https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-tool-chest

Hobbyist mathematics may long outlive a lot of research mathematics, and I think that’s okay. There’s nothing in the human spirit of inquiry that necessitates academia as an all-powerful institution. Heck, there have been a lot of problems with the institution in recent years, and those have everything to do with perverse incentives and nothing to do with AI.

Do side projects that interest you, ones that you need or want. Why does it matter if anyone else cares or not.

The random guy bagging the groceries can never do it, not even with AI, because to get it right requires defining the specifications and requirements in good detail to the AI. Without this detail, the output is likely to remain unsatisfactory. A code review matters too for the same reason.

But then you realise you're spending too much time on it. And you just want to see the ending. So you enter the cheat codes to make it easy. You blast through everything, you get to the last levels and still easy. And things start feeling meaningless and pointless, and in fact, probably because of that, you quickly lose interest in the game completely.

It now feels like we're in the end game.

For hundreds of thousands of years we struggled with finding food, be it foraging or hunting, both of which requiring a lot of skill, dealing with several difficult diseases throughout adulthood, droughts, finding new places to stay for the night, for food.

And now... all we do is sit 8h per day in front of a screen, and everything else is taken care of. We can even have sex without having babies and a huge lifelong commitement. A first! The pleasures that it unlocks. We have food from all over the world at our fingertips. A feast no hunter-gatherer tribe would ever in their wildest dreams could even conceive of. We have cameras streaming animals from all over the world, lions killing impalas recorded being uploaded for the pleasure of people who watch it on youtube, or simply fledgling birds and their progress, we monitor the weather on all of Earth. We convert sunlight into thunder energy, and make thinking machines from rock. Truly, feels like the last levels of a game where we have the cheat codes.

A fish will rarely ask himself "what is water?". It just is. That's just how it is. So we also tend not to realise the ridiculousness of the world we live in because we have been born in it. Even more so younger generations. Some of us have seen the world rapidly changing at an increasingly faster pace. This all we have today is NOT normal. We live in the equivalent of a fraction of the blink of an eye to human existence.

Of course, we stress. A lot. Our mental health has never been worse. But this is feels like the end game. Our 'progressivism' and 'Libertarianism' led us to change a lot without thinking of the consequences. And here we are, reaching the finish line, unprepared. Our systems, laws, mental stability have no have time to adapt.

And it's scary. I hope we can pull it through.

I noticed when a non-tech person tries to solve a problem with AI, they only tend to think in-terms on LLM. For e.g. even for a calculator app they use LLM for compute instead of direct calculation.

Sure they have managed to solve it. But they are remotely usable.

I have seen multiple failed projects taking these vibe coded ideas to production.

I wouldn't be disheartened and give up.

About 150 years ago, Nietzsche wrote

> God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

about the secularization of society. Perhaps something similar is happening to knowledge work now, but I think it was never a great idea to derive all your life's meaning from it anyway.